Everybody Loves You (28 page)

“Can they hear us?” he whispered.

“No, they're asleep.”

“You know what? I want to be just like them when I'm grown up. Do you think that can happen?”

“I think wanting it is halfway there.”

He dropped off then, but came to after a bit and asked, “What do you want to be?”

“Well … I'm already grown up.”

“Yes,” he agreed. Then: “What are you?”

He fell asleep again, this time for the night, so I didn't trouble to respond.

*   *   *

Saturday, almost unnaturally warm, brought on a kind of free-lance field day, with touch football, nature walks, and hide-and-seek. A far cry from a weekend in The Pines, but then this is Straightville. Clothes matter, so Peter lent Cosgrove a black turtleneck and sunshades to go over his corduroy pants from the day before and give him something of a Look. Jack topped it with a Greek fisherman's cap.

“He looks good enough to eat,” Miriam told me as the company sashayed into the sun after breakfast. “
Is
he?” she insisted.

“As you asking or telling?”

“You know I don't like mysteries. At least share what you talk about at night.”

“He tells me what he'll be when he grows up.”

She performed one of those slow polysyllabic laughs that Irene Dunne specialized in. “Gay men always think no one knows anything about them.”

Cosgrove ran by us, shouting for joy. He had already lost the hat and the glasses.

“No one of you possibly could know us,” I told Miriam. “We're still working on knowing ourselves.”

“What's there to know? We're all the same. There is only one life. When you're young, you run through it yelling because you're loaded with sex and friends. When you're forty-eight, scarred by a couple of tough romances and terrified your building will co-op and dump you out, you stalk,
stalk
through your life.” She snorted. “So for God's sake, give me a hug, you!”

Lunch was a hamburger cookout, and if they had held an eating contest, Cosgrove would have taken it. I've never seen anyone so devoted to baked beans. However, he had plenty of opportunity to run it all off in the hide-and-seek that followed. I enjoyed it; it must have been well over twenty years since I had uttered the words “Not it.” In the event, It was a cumbersome art director who had the air of resenting everything about the weekend, especially including hide-and-seek. Cosgrove and I smuggled ourselves high up in an apple tree, and when It came upon us, in sight but out of tag reach, he looked like L. B. Mayer screening Joan Crawford's porn loop.

“You're supposed to hide,” he told us. “Not
do
things!”

The straights' reply to Stonewall.

Meanwhile, in the near distance, we heard one of the other players cry out, “Allee allee, olsen gee; everybody tagged is free!” Giggles and catcalls resounded as It turned to see all his prisoners running loose.

“You goofball!” said Cosgrove.

Whereupon It grabbed a loose branch and began banging the trunk of our tree in irate frustration.

“Neutrality! Neutrality!” said Miriam, coming up from the house in something like a bridal gown, veil and all. “It's the Red Cross.” She took us all in. “Whatever is this man doing?” she asked me.

It complained, “How am I supposed to get them way up there?”

I whistled “Here Comes the Bride,” and Miriam responded, modeling her wedding dress. “My motto,” she explained, “is ‘Be prepared.'” Like a number of straight women who chum around with gay men, Miriam both fears and apes the queen. “You never know what will happen,” she concluded.

Two players came sailing by, taunting It, and he ran off in pursuit. “I only hope to give,” said Miriam, watching It's progress through the trees, “the truest party ever given.”

“I love it,” said Cosgrove. “I don't ever want to leave.”

“You don't ever have to,” she replied very simply.

“Why
are
you dressed like that, anyway?” I asked.

“It's Halloween. I came out to bring you all inside. To save you from things that go bump in the night.”

In fact, it was getting dark. We had literally whiled the day away. Miriam held out her arms to us. “Come!” she called. “This is our time!”

She was speaking to us but she was looking at Cosgrove, and he scrambled down the tree and ran into her arms with that peremptory desperation that always shocks the unready. But Miriam loved it; she seemed to understand, all at once, his grief and anxiety, and to want to assuage them.

“Now this is what I believe is a hug,” she said.

*   *   *

Nowhere in this weekend was the difference between straight and gay as evident as in the parade of the costumes. Gays spend all of their lives in costume, from the disguises of childhood and the closeted to the dress codes of the ghetto. One's costumes are, in effect, an objective correlative of the role or roles one chooses to play. To straights, clothes are at most an expedient, a convenience, perhaps a sensation: but always supplementary and occasional, varying with the personality rather than attempting to identify it. To straights, costumes are a treat. To gays, costumes are life.

Cosgrove, of course, had no costume. Even if he had had a chance to appoint one, I doubt he could have done so, for Cosgrove was of neither the straight nor the gay world, culturally an orphan. He did not feel left out at the costume ball, however, for Miriam let him and two other noncontenders judge the contest, and the responsibility entranced him. He got a little carried away, asking a Fairy Princess to “turn around all over” and telling Kharis the Mummy to “do a funny dance.” But everyone seemed to be taking him for a charming eccentric; and heaven knows they've all had to put up with far more questionable behavior from men they took to be tricks.

The costume ball peaked in an impromptu theatrical, under Miriam's direction. Each of us was assigned to extemporize scenes in the role suggested by our dress. Naturally, Kharis the Mummy was after the Fairy Princess, who blundered, at Miriam's suggestion, into his tomb. We also had a Robot, Jimmy Carter, Snow White, and miscellaneous monsters, and I as Cowboy eventually rounded everyone up and knelt to do homage to the Fairy Princess, while Peter, who for some reason came as Charles Evans Hughes, passed judgment in his Supreme Court robes.

It was fun, though it lacked the demented verve of comparable exhibitions by Stonewall's thespians. Cosgrove, nonetheless, was thrilled. He clapped and cheered like a suburbanite at
Cats.

“Why do we have to go back?” he asked me when the music came on and the gang took to the dance floor.

“We don't live here.”

That's easy for me to say, he thinks: I do live somewhere. Where does Cosgrove live? He looks at me with the wheedling eroticism of Cosgrove the intruder, Cosgrove the hungry, the devious, compulsively begging men to use him in the absurd hope that sex will connect him. It will: but not to what he needs. He wants to be Jack, permanently emPetered, enfolded. He uses sex because love doesn't work for him. It comes too slow, or not at all. It fails to shelter him.

I should reassure him; I have been thinking of what we can all do to rescue him.

“Cosgrove,” I say, taking him by the shoulders. “Don't be afraid. You have friends. We won't let you down.”

He watches me. Has he heard this before: before he was let down by friends?

“Can we go back to the beach?” he asks.

He doesn't mean physically, but emotionally: can we treat him like a member of the family again?

“Yes,” I tell him.

“How?” he poses.

He's not that stupid. Nothing is automatic. Everything must be arranged and agreed upon by all parties.

“We're just going to have to find a way.”

“Please,” he says. He always says please.

And I think, after all these years, of the narrator of the clown dog story, and I see a version of him in Cosgrove, and I have no choice but to put my arms around him and pronounce the most meaningless two words in English, “There, there.” Why
there?
What's there?

Miriam is; she misses nothing, especially the sight of two men who can't figure out what they mean to each other. The party has gone quite well, all told, but it has climaxed. Tomorrow will be a series of farewells, of guests breaking free of Miriam's hold and, for all the good times, probably not returning for another of these so very elaborate endeavors. Sometimes even charm, wit, and good intentions are not enough, and the fun simply dies on you.

“It's all over,” Miriam comments, “but the toast and coffee in the morning.”

“Every story ends,” I tell her.

“What about the story of nobody's boy?” she asks, scanning Cosgrove's face. “How does that end?”

“Is that me?” Cosgrove asks.

“Just the question I ask myself,” says Miriam. “Almost every day now.
‘Is that me?'
”

“I know a story,” says Cosgrove.

“When you're young,” says Miriam, “you never have to ask. You don't think of it.”

“Once there was a mother and father,” Cosgrove begins, “and they had a baby boy. But there was magic, and the Elf King put an elf baby in its place and took the human baby to live with the elf people. And the elf baby seemed just, just, just like the human baby, and ate the same foods and watched television. But the human mother and father were not sure. The mother said to the father, Something is wrong with him, and the father said, He is not what we wanted. He doesn't please us right.”

Cosgrove looked at us.

“Even though he did everything to be good. He was out playing, and they said, No, no, no, you clean up your room, you are selfish. So he was inside cleaning everything right up, and they said, No, no, no, you have no friends, you don't act right. And they were mean to him, like making him eat foods he hated and saying he was stupid and probably not even human.”

Cosgrove looked at us.

“But the elf child knew that the other children in the family were not good, even though they were always getting presents. The elf child gave presents to his mother and father more than the human children did, because he
had
to, so they would think he was human, too. He gave better presents every time. He gave them high castles to live safe in, and fire that would never go out, and dreams that come true. But the mother and father never cared about it. All they knew was, he was not what they liked. So he ran away and begged the Elf King to take him back where he belonged. But the Elf King said, No, no, no, you must be with humans and give them more presents.”

Cosgrove looked at us.

“But no matter what, the boy couldn't make the humans like him. They always figured out that he was an elf, and they would never let him in, because they were frightened of elf stuff. So one day the boy gave them other presents. You know what he gave them now? He gave them clothes that itch and you can never take them off, and scare-you noises coming from secret places, and candy that when you eat it it's like broken glass in your mouth and your blood pours down your chin and everyone screams when you look at them.”

Miriam shook her head. “If he does that, the Elf King will swoop down and take him away and shut him up where no one will ever see him again. He has to learn how to live with humankind.” She looked at me. “And with straights,” she said. “Right?”

Cosgrove looked down, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe he doesn't care after all this,” he said. “Because how come he has to give presents and never get any back?”

Everyone else had gone to bed. Alone in the great room, we shuffled about in some halfhearted tidying and then dragged upstairs. Miriam kissed us both good night.

Once again, Jack and Peter, so beautifully interlocked they might have been poured from a mold, held Cosgrove's gaze. And again, Cosgrove slid into bed and fitted up against me as if we had been, like Jack and Peter, doing this for years. For a long while we lay thus, listening to each other breathe, then Cosgrove whispered, “Would you please pet me a little?”

“Pet you?”

“You know.”

We played together then, Stonewall-style with a postmodernist edge, circling around the scary parts in our morbid new Precautions for this age of Love Is Death. Even so, cut off from each other at our most intimate, the physical remains the essential communication of our fraternity, the door through which friends long to pass. How else shall we know each other? Compassion, you may say.

But this was compassion.

I didn't care to have Cosgrove till I cared what would happen to him. Selfishly, I suffered a rage of distaste for him because his reckless adventures had compromised my ability to know him: selfishly, because these adventures were the dues Cosgrove feared he must pay, the changeling's attempts to become human, his presents. I squeezed him, all of him, arms and legs, so tightly I thought he'd cry out; I wanted to squeeze the recklessness out of him. But all he said was “Please.” I loved him furiously. I hated him dearly, for comprehending the perfect lovers Jack and Peter while having helped to destroy the perfect safety of such love. I was in bed with the Plague—poor thing; it can't help itself. It doesn't love to kill you. It just kills you.

And Cosgrove, beside me, was laughing so quietly that I didn't realize what I had heard till some moments later.

*   *   *

Of course, none of my friends knew that Cosgrove had come with me to Woodstock, and there was great relief when the two of us turned up at Dennis Savage's on Sunday afternoon. Virgil, unable to reach Cosgrove through whatever code procedures they had set up, had been frantic with worry, and Dennis Savage, as The Man Who Sent Cosgrove Away, had been paying for Virgil's discomfort with his own. So, then: a knock, we enter into a moment of dumbstruck catharsis, and Virgil explodes with greeting of Cosgrove and Dennis Savage apologizes to him and Cosgrove, barely able to believe this change of fortune, is telling of his Halloween weekend.